Caray, Caray!

Thank you, Urban, for posting the opera clips! I enjoyed the shorter ones already, but I will have to postpone Tosca until I can watch it in its entirety. (BTW, how do you italicize on this blog?)

Since MCET is my first tn, I cannot compare them (tns) to operas. However, I have an interesting personal point to make about operas in general. In a prior post, some bloggers suggested Enfrique listened to opera for its snob appeal, helping him to identify with the Ivy-League crowd. Because of my upbringing, I do not associate opera with snobbery. My parents' families emigrated from Italy in the early 1900s (through Ellis Island), and the men were mosaic tile artists and cement masons, blue-collar people, who LOVED opera. Therefore, I associate opera with my blue-collar, large Italian family.

Enjoy Carmen! (I'm jealous.)


 

Urban - Enjoyed the walk through the tenors of opera. Thanks for sharing.

The first time the link between opera and telenovelas hit me was Fuego en la Sangre. A villain's wife was at last defiant before him and got a very dramatic violent death. I remember thinking "I've been watching opera and didn't even know it." All that was missing from the death scene was a song.
 

Urban - thank you so much for the Tosca clip! Placido in his prime - no one could beat him for the total package - voice, looks, masculinity, dark eyes. Incredible.
How I wish I could have seen him in an opera then. Or anytime, actually.
What a great way to start my Sat. morning!

 

Don't hate me for this, but I've actually had the pleasure of meeting him... and two others in the lead post. Sr Domingo is very charming and very generous to his fans with his time. When he's signing CDs and DVDs in the Met shop he frequently exceeds the usual allotted time of two hours (These events are never on an artist's day to perform on stage).

He truly is a god in the opera world.
 

Urban:

I don't know anything at all about opera so I won't comment about your question.

However, I wanted to say how much I appreciate your "Weekend Discussion" blog. You present very thought-provoking questions that lend themselves perfectly to reflect on what I would describe as novela addiction.

Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the story, I forget it is all make believe! We talk about the characters as if they were real people and their experiences were really happening.

Again thank you for helping to expand our brains and viewing experience
 

Worst Galan Award goes to ARTURO of Por Siempre Mi Amor.

Whines like a big crybaby just like his spoiled daughter, Aranza the BRAT.
 

Opera probably has a lot more snob appeal now than two generations ago. It's almost an alien art form to today's youth who didn't grow up with Italian or German elders who were into it.

The fact that music appreciation is no longer taught in many US schools is frightening to me.

My point in putting this discussion up is that so many of the stock characters and stock plot points in novelas are nothing new; they've been done by Verdi, Wagner, Donizetti, Massenet, and other composers.

And now opera producers love the idea of tenors who actually look like the dashing fellows they portray.
 

UA, muchísimas gracias for this wonderful topic and, especially, all the great videos. The big surprise for me was the clip of Jonas Kaufman in Carmen. Wow! I'd of course heard of him, but I'd never seen or heard him until I saw your clip. what a wonderful match of appearance, acting, and singing! He's now on my radar.

I've had the good fortune to hear in person Jay Hunter Morris (a totally different but equally successful blend of physique, acting, and voice), Juan Diego Florez, and Placido Domingo. I've been lucky enough to have seen Domingo in his prime as well as in his 60s and 70s. At 73, he's no longer young galan material, but his voice is still amazing.

Like you, I've often noted many similarities between opera and telenovelas -- the larger-than-life characters, the melodramatic plots, the love of coincidence, etc. etc. I don't have anything profound to add except my profound thanks to you for this thread and the hope that you will have another thread for baritones and bassos. (I'm trying to remember the name of a rather attractive singer who played Don Giovanni with his shirt mostly open, but although I can still picture him, my memory has totally failed to come up with a name. Of course, lots of telenovela galans have open shirt or no shirt, but I think it's less common in opera.)
 

Yes, alas, there seem to be far fewer opera lovers among today's young people. However, one doesn't have to grow up in an opera-loving home or have opera-loving friends as a teenager to develop into an opera lover. I did not listen to opera as a child or teenager. Then, in my early 20s, I started dating someone who liked opera. We would go back to his place at the end of a date and he'd put on a huge reel-to-reel tape (yup, it was a while ago!) as, um, background music. The tape had both "La Traviata" and "Il Trovatore." It didn't take long for me to become an opera lover and a Verdi fan (though it was years before I could tell whether an aria was from Traviata or Trovatore :-) )
 

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